Obama Urges Senators To Confirm Spymaster

By HELENE COOPER

Published: June 6, 2010

WASHINGTON -- President Obama urged the Senate to quickly confirm his new pick for director of national intelligence, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., asking that the retired Air Force general's nomination not become hostage to Washington politics.

''He has a quality I prize among all my advisers -- an ability to tell me what we need to know, as opposed to just what we want to hear,'' Mr. Obama said on Saturday, standing next to General Clapper in the Rose Garden to announce his selection. ''Mr. Obama said General Clapper, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran who rose from the position of signal intelligence officer to under secretary of defense for intelligence, ''understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress.''

General Clapper has a long history in Washington; he clashed with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and was pushed out of office as a result, only to return to the Pentagon as a top lieutenant to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The announcement of General Clapper as the next director of national intelligence came just two weeks after Mr. Obama forced Adm. Dennis C. Blair out of the spymaster job. The selection is an attempt by the president to try to recalibrate an intelligence structure that has undergone continued revamping since the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war, yet by most accounts still lacks the cohesion necessary to deal with evolving terrorist threats.

Even as intelligence agencies expand their role overseas with drone strikes in Pakistan and an increased focus on Yemen and Somalia, they have been confronted by renewed attacks in the United States.

If confirmed by the Senate, General Clapper will be the fourth official since 2005 to oversee the nation's 16 intelligence agencies -- a job that many intelligence officials have said is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Mr. Obama may have to expend some of his political capital to get General Clapper confirmed. In the Senate, representatives of both the Democratic and Republican Parties complain that General Clapper is too close to the military. But several leading civilian candidates for the job, including Leon E. Panetta, the Central Intelligence Agency director, and former Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made clear that they were not interested.

General Clapper followed Mr. Obama to the lectern to deliver remarks -- and they were short in the extreme. After calling himself ''humbled, honored and daunted'' by the magnitude of the position and promising to make sure that America's intelligence apparatus works, he joked that the national intelligence position and intelligence in general were ''like my grandchildren'': ''Better seen than heard.''